Hasan Minhaj

Hasan Minhaj is an American comedian and actor whose comedy works through Indian culture and American politics with satire, observation and dark humour. ¹ He was a senior correspondent on The Daily Show from 2014 to 2018, the featured speaker at the 2017 White House Correspondents' Dinner, and the host of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix (2018–2020), which won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and two Webby Awards. ¹ Time listed him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019. ¹

He was born on 23 September 1985 in Davis, California, to Indian Muslim parents from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh — Najme Minhaj, an organic chemist, and Seema Minhaj (née Usmani). ^{1 2} After his birth his mother returned to India for eight years to complete medical school, visiting after three years to give birth to his sister in 1989, while he remained in the United States with his father. ¹ He attended Davis Senior High School and graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 2007 with a degree in political science. ¹

He took up comedy at college after watching Chris Rock's Never Scared (2004), won Wild 94.9's "Best Comic Standing" competition in 2008, and worked through NBC's Stand-up for Diversity, MTV's Failosophy and guest roles before joining The Daily Show on 19 November 2014 as the last correspondent hired by Jon Stewart. ¹ His audition sketch, "Batman vs. Bill Maher", grew out of a televised argument about Islam between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher days earlier. ¹ At the 2017 White House Correspondents' Dinner he roasted the boycotting president, saying: "Only in America can a second-generation Indian-American Muslim kid get on the stage and make fun of the president." ¹ His one-man show Homecoming King, built on the second-generation immigrant experience, became a Netflix special in May 2017 and won a Peabody Award. ¹ Patriot Act premiered on Netflix on 28 October 2018, ran to 40 episodes before Netflix declined to renew it in August 2020, and won him a second Peabody in April 2019. ¹ In September 2019 he testified before a U.S. House committee on student-loan debt, and in December 2021 he founded the production company 186K Films. ¹ His second Netflix special, The King's Jester, appeared in 2022 and his third, Off With His Head, in October 2024, when he also launched the YouTube talk show and podcast Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know. ¹

The English article states that Minhaj is a Muslim with liberal Islamic beliefs and considers himself "non-dogmatic"; no source names a school for him, and Wikidata gives Islam generically, so this record carries that self-description as his stance and records no faith segment. ^{1 2} In a 2026 interview he named the influences on his vision of Islam as his father, his mother, his grandmother — who would rise in the night for the tahajjud prayer — and Malcolm X, and said Islam appeals to him because it combines the legalism and Abrahamic legacy of Judaism and Christianity with the spirituality of the Dharmic faiths. ¹ He married Beena Patel in January 2015; the sources note that she is a Hindu of Gujarati descent and he a Muslim of Uttar Pradeshi descent, a difference he discussed in Homecoming King. ¹

This section sets out reported positions; it is not a verdict by the museum. In September 2023 The New Yorker reported that Minhaj acknowledged, for the first time, that many anecdotes in his Netflix specials were untrue — among them the teenage story of being slammed against a car by police after mocking a man believed to be an FBI informant at his mosque, and the story of an anthrax-threat letter spilling onto his daughter, who was in reality never hospitalised. ¹ Minhaj answered that every story in his style is built around "a seed of truth" — in his figures, "seventy per cent emotional truth" and thirty per cent hyperbole — and that this is "inherent to the art form". ¹ The following month he posted a video response apologising for disappointing fans while defending the stories as highlighting real threats, surveillance and Islamophobia, and arguing that his political comedy and congressional testimony were held to rigorous fact-checking while his storytelling comedy, he assumed, allowed blurrier lines. ¹ Critics quoted in the article argued the embellishments risked undermining trust in him as a commentator, and in his 2024 special Off With His Head he described the episode as "dorky". ¹

Minhaj and Patel have a daughter (born April 2018) and a son (born February 2020), and the family moved from New York City to Greenwich, Connecticut, during the pandemic. ¹ He is fluent in Hindi and Urdu as well as English, and is a Sacramento Kings fan. ¹ In October 2023 he joined the Artists4Ceasefire call for a ceasefire in the Gaza war. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.